
Class L O i'- 



Book 



m. 



Copyri^htN^ 



COPYHIGIIT DEPOSIT. 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/huxleyeducationa01osbo 



HUXLEY 
AND EDUCATION 



-7y 



o -zf. 



HUXLEY 
AND EDUCATION 



ADDRESS AT 

THE OPENING OF THE COLLEGE YEAR 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

September 28, 19 10 



BY 

HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 

LL.D., Hon. D.Sc, Came. 
DA COSTA PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1910 



\ 



v^o* 



Copyright, 1910 
By Henry Fairfield Osborn 



THE DE VINNE PRESS 



CC!.A27SM';(J3 



HUXLEY AND EDUCATION 

"The Stars come nightly to the sky; 
The tidal wave comes to the sea ; 
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high 
Can keep my own away from me." 

— Burroughs. 

^TT^HE most sanguine day of the 
-■- college year is the opening one : 
the student has not yet faced the im- 
possible task annually presented of 
embracing the modern world of 
knowledge ; his errors and failures of 
earlier years are forgotten ; he faces 
the coming months full of new hope. 
How would my old master, Hux- 
ley, address you if he were to find 
you in this felicitous frame of mind, 
sharpening your wits and your pen- 
cils for the contest which will begin 
to-morrow morning in every hall and 
5 



HUXLEY 

laboratory of this great University t 
May I speak for him as I heard him 
during the winter of 1879-80 from 
his lecture desk and as he kindly in 
conversation gave me of his stores of 
wisdom and experience ? May I add 
from his truly brilliant essays entitled 
** Science and Education," delivered 
between 1874 and 1887? May I 
contribute also from my own thirty- 
seven years of life as a student and 
teacher, beginning in 1873 and reach- 
ing a turning point in 1910 when 
Columbia enrolled me among its re- 
search professors? It was Huxley's 
life, his example, the tone of his 
writings, rather than his actual pre- 
cepts which most influenced me, for 
in 1879 he was so intensely absorbed 
in public work and administration, as 
well as in research and teaching, that 
little opportunity remained for lab- 
6 



AND EDUCATION 

oratory conferences with his students. 
How I happened to go to him was 
as follows : 

Unlucky — as they appeared to me 
at the time, but lucky as I look back 
upon them — were my own early 
flounderings and blunderings in seek- 
ing the true method of education. 
Huxley has observed of his " Voy- 
age of the Rattlesnake *' that it is a 
good thing to get down to the bare 
bones of existence. The same is true 
of self-education. As compared with 
the hosts of to-day, few men in i 877 
knew how to guide the graduate 
youth ; the Johns Hopkins was still 
nascent; the creative force of Louis 
Agassiz had spent itself in producing 
the first school of naturalists, includ- 
ing the genius, William James. One 
learnt one's errors through falling 
into pitfalls. With two companions 
7 



HUXLEY 

I was guided by a sort of blind in- 
stinct to feel that the most important 
thing in life was to make a discovery 
of some kind. On consulting one of 
our most forceful and genial profess- 
ors his advice was negative and dis- 
couraging: ** Young men/' he said, 
"go on with your studies for ten 
or twelve years until you have cov- 
ered the whole subject ; you will 
then be ready for research of your 
own." There appeared to be some- 
thing wrong about this, although we 
did not know exactly what. We dis- 
regarded the advice, left the labora- 
tory of this professor, and at the end 
of the year did succeed in writing 
a paper which subsequently attracted 
the attention of Huxley and was the 
indirect means of an introduction to 
Darwin. It was a lame product, but 
it was ours, and in looking back upon 

8 



AND EDUCATION 

it, one feels with Touchstone in his 
comment upon Audrey : 

"A poor virgin, Sir, 
An ill favored thing. Sir, 
But mine own." 

I shall present in this brief address 
only one idea, namely, the lesson of 
Huxley's life and the result of my own 
experience is that productive thinking 
is the chief means as well as the chief 
end of education, and that the natural 
evolution of education will be to de- 
velop this kind of thinking earlier and 
earlier in the life of the student. 

One of the most marvelous of the 
manifold laws of evolution is what is 
called * acceleration' By this law the 
beginning of an important organ like 
the eye of the chick, for example, is 
thrust forward into a very early stage 
9 



HUXLEY 

of embryonic development. This is, 
first, because the eye is a very com- 
plex organ and needs a long time for 
development, and second because the 
fully formed eye of most animals is 
needed immediately at birth. I pre- 
dict that the analogy in the evolution 
of education will be very close. Pro- 
ductive thinking may be compared to 
the eye; it is needed by the student 
the moment he graduates, or is 
hatched, so to speak; it is now devel- 
oped only in the graduate schools. It 
is such an integral and essential part 
of education that the spirit of it is 
destined to be ' accelerated,' or thrust 
forward into the opening and prepara- 
tory years. 

If the lines of one's life were to be 
cast afresh, if by some metempsy- 
chosis one were moulded into what is 
known as a "great educator," a man 



10 



AND EDUCATION 

of conventions and platforms, and were 
suddenly to become more or less re- 
sponsible for 3,000 minds and souls, 
productive thinking, or the "cen- 
trifugal method'' of teaching, would 
not be postponed to graduation or 
thereafter, but would begin with the 
Freshman, yes, among these humble 
men of low estate! It may be apropos 
to recall a story told of President 
McCosh of Princeton, a man who in- 
spired all his students to production 
and enlivened them with a constant 
flow of humor. On one occasion he 
invited his predecessor, ex-President 
McLean, to offer prayers in the Col- 
lege Chapel. Dr. McLean's prayer 
was at once all embracing and remin- 
iscent ; it descended from the foreign 
powers to the heads of the United 
States government, to the State of 
New Jersey, through the Trustees, 



HUXLEY 

the Faculty, and, in a perfectly logi- 
cal manner, finally reached the enter- 
ing class. This naturally raised a 
great disturbance among the Sopho- 
mores, who were evidently jealous of 
the divine blessing. The disturbance 
brought the prayer to an abrupt close, 
and Dr. McCosh was heard to re- 
mark: ''I should think that Dr. Mc- 
Lean would have more sense than to 
pray for the Freshmen.'' 

As regards the raw material into 
which * productive thinking' is to be 
instilled, I am an optimist. I do not 
belong to the 'despair school' of ed- 
ucators, and have no sympathy with 
the army of editorial writers and prigs 
who are depreciating the American 
student. The chief trouble lies not 
with our youth, nor with our schools, 
but with our adults. How can springs 
rise higher than their sources? On the 

12 



AND EDUCATION 

whole, you students are very much 
above the average American. You 
are not driven to these doors ; cer- 
tainly in these days of youthful 
freedom and choice you came of 
your own free will. The very fact 
of your coming raises you above the 
general level, and while you are here 
you will be living in a world of ideas, 
— the only kind of a world at all 
worth living in. You are temporarily 
cut off more or less from the world 
of dollars and cents, shillings and 
pence. Here Huxley helps you in 
extolling the sheer sense of joy in 
thinking truer and straighter than 
others, a kind of superiority which 
does not mean conceit, the possession 
of something which is denied the 
man in the street. You redound 
with original impulses and creative 
energy, which must find expression 
13 



HUXLEY 

somehow or somewhere; if not under 
the prevailing incurrent, or * centrip- 
etal system ' of academic instruction, 
it must let itself out in extra-academic 
activities, in your sports, your socie- 
ties, your committees, your organiza- 
tions, your dramatics, all good things 
and having the highest educational 
value in so far as they represent your 
output, your outflow, your centrifugal 
force. 

You are, in fact, in a contest with 
your intellectual environment outside 
of these walls. Morally, according 
to Ferrero, politically, according to 
Bryce, and economically, according 
to Carnegie, you are in the midst of 
a * triumphant democracy.' But in 
the world of ideas such as sways Italy, 
Germany, England, and in the high- 
est degree France, you are in the 
midst of a * triumphant mediocrity.' 
H 



AND EDUCATION 
Paris is a city where ideas are at a 
premium and money values count for 
very little in public estimation. The 
whole public waits breathless upon 
the production of ' Chanticleer/ 
That Walhalla of French ambition, 
* la Gloire/ may be reached by men 
of ideas, but not by men of the marts. 
Is it conceivable that the police of 
New York should assemble to fight a 
mob gathered to break up the opera 
of a certain composer ? Is it con- 
ceivable that you students should 
crowd into this theatre to prevent a 
speaker being heard, as those of the 
Sorbonne did some years ago in the 
case of Brunetiere ? If you should, 
no one in this city would understand 
you, and the authorities would be 
called on promptly to interfere. 

A fair measure of the culture of 
your environment is the depth to 
15 



HUXLEY 

which your morning paper prostitutes 
itself for the dollar, its shades of yel- 
lowness, its frivolity or its unscrupu- 
lousness, or both. I sometimes think 
it would be better not to read the 
newspapers at all, even when they are 
conscientious, because of their lack of 
a sense of proportion, in the news 
columns at least, of the really impor- 
tant things in American life. Our 
most serious evening mentor of stu- 
dent manners and morals gives six 
columns to a football game and six 
lines to a great intercollegiate debate. 
Such is the difference between precept 
and practice. American laurels are 
for the giant captain of industry ; 
when his life is threatened or taken 
away acres of beautiful forest are cut 
down to procure the paper pulp nec- 
essary to set forth his achievements, 
while our greatest astronomer and 
16 



AND EDUCATION 

mathematician passes away and per- 
haps the pulp of a single tree will 
sufSce for the brief, inconspicuous 
paragraphs which record his illness 
and death. 

Your British cousin is in a far more 
favorable atmosphere, beginning with 
his morning paper and ending with 
the conversation of his seniors over 
the evening cigar. As a Cambridge 
man, having spent two years in Lon- 
don and the university, I would not 
describe the life so much as serious as 
worth while. There are humor and 
the pleasures of life in abundance, but 
what is done, is done thoroughly well. 
Contrast the comments of the British 
and American press on such a light 
subject as international polo ; the 
former alone are well worth reading, 
written by experts and adding some- 
thing to our knowledge of the game. 
17 



HUXLEY 

In the more novel subject of aviation 
we look in vain in our press for any 
solid information about construction. 
Or take the practical subject of poli- 
tics ; the British student finds every 
great speech delivered in every part 
of the Empire published in full in his 
morning paper ; as an elector he gets 
his evidence at first hand instead of 
through the medium of the editor. 

I believe the greatest fault of the 
American student lies in the over- 
development of one of his greatest 
virtues, namely, his collectivism. 
His strong esprit de corps patterns and 
moulds him too far. The rewards 
are for the * lock-step ' type of man 
who conforms to the prevailing ideals 
of his college. He must parade, he 
must cheer, to order. Individualism 
is at a discount ; it debars a man from 
the social rewards of college life. In 

i8 



AND EDUCATION 

my last address to Columbia students 
on the life of Darwin/ I asked what 
would be thought of that peculiar, 
ungainly, beetle collector if he were 
to enter one of our colleges to-day ? 
He would be lampooned and laughed 
out of the exercise of his preferences 
and predispositions. The mother of 
a very talented young honor man re- 
cently confessed to me that she never 
spoke of her son's rank because she 
found it was considered "queer.'' 
This is not what young America 
generates, but what it borrows or re- 
flects from the environment of its 
elders. 

Thus the young American is not 

1 Life and Works of Darwin. Pop. Sci. Monthly, 
Apr., 1909, pp. 315-340. (Address delivered at 
Columbia University on the one hundredth anniver- 
sary of Darwin's birth, as the first of a series of nine 
lectures on ** Charles Darwin and His Influence on 
Science.") 

19 



HUXLEY 
lifted up by the example of his sen- 
iors, he has to lift it up. If he is a 
student and has serious ambitions he 
represents the young salt of his nation, 
and the college brotherhood in gen- 
eral is a light shining in the darkness. 
Thus stumbling, groping, often mis- 
led by his natural leaders, he does 
somehow or other, through sheer 
force, acquire an education, and is 
just as surely coming to the front in 
the leadership of the American nation 
as the Oxford or Cambridge man is 
leading the British nation. 

Our student body is as fine as can 
be, it represents the best blood and 
the best impulses of the country ; but 
there may be something wrong, some 
loss, some delay, some misdirection of 
educational energy. 

Bad as the British university sys- 
tem may be, and it has been vastly 



AND EDUCATION 

improved by the influence of Huxley, 
it is more eflfective than ours because 
more centrifugal. English lads are 
taught to compose, even to speak in 
Latin and Greek. The Greek play 
is an anomaly here, it is an annual 
affair at Cambridge. There are not 
one but many active and successful 
debating clubs in Cambridge. 

The faults with our educational 
design are to be discovered through 
study of the lives of great men and 
through one's own hard and stony 
experience. The best text-books for 
the nurture of the mind are these 
very lives, and they are not found in 
the lists of the pedagogues. Consult 
your Froebel, if you will, but follow 
the actual steps to Parnassus of the men 
whose political, literary, scientific, or 
professional career you expect to fol- 
low. If you would be a missionary, 



21 



HUXLEY 

take the lives of Patterson and Liv- 
ingstone; if an engineer, 'The Lives 
of Engineers ; ' if a physician, study 
that of Pasteur, which I consider by 
far the noblest scientific life of the 
nineteenth century ; if you would be 
a man of science, study the recently 
published lives and letters of Darwin, 
Spencer, Kelvin, and of our prototype 
Huxley. 

Here you may discover the secret 
of greatness, which is, first, to be born 
great, unfortunately a difficult and 
often impossible task; second, to 
possess the instinct of self- education. 
You will find that every one of these 
masters while more or less influenced 
by their tutors and governors was led 
far more by a sort of internal, instinc- 
tive feeling that they must do certain 
things and learn certain things. They 
may fight the battle royal with par- 



AND EDUCATION 

ents, teachers, and professors, they 
may be as rebellious as ducklings 
amidst broods of chickens and give as 
much concern to the mother fowls, 
but without exception from a very 
early age they do their own thinking 
and revolt against having it done for 
them, and they seek their own mode 
of learning. The boy Kelvin is taken 
to Germany by his father to study the 
mathematics of Kelland ; he slips 
down into the cellar to the French of 
Fourier, and at the age of fifteen pub- 
lishes his first paper to demonstrate 
that Fourier is right and Kelland is 
wrong. Pasteur's first research in 
crystallography is so brilliant that his 
professor urges him to devote himself 
to this branch of science, but Pasteur 
insists upon continuing for five years 
longer his general studies in chemistry 
and physics. 

23 



HUXLEY 

This is the true empirical, or la- 
boratory method of getting at the 
trouble, if trouble there be in the 
American modus operandi; but a 
generation of our great educators have 
gone into the question as if no experi- 
ments had ever been made. In the 
last thirty years one has seen rise up a 
series of * healers,' trying to locate the 
supposed weakness in the American 
student: one finds it in the classic 
tongues and substitutes the modern ; 
one in the required system and sub- 
stitutes the elective ; one in the lack 
of contact between teacher and stu- 
dent and brings in preceptors, under 
whom the patient shows a slight im- 
provement. Now the kind of diag- 
nosis which comes from examining . 
such a life as that of Huxley shows V 
that the real trouble lies in the pro- 
longation to mature years of what may 
24 



AND EDUCATION 

be styled the ' centripetal system/ 
namely, that afferent, or inflowing 
mediaeval and oriental kind of instruc- 
tion in which the student is rarely if 
ever forced to do his own thinking. 

You will perceive by this that I 
am altogether on your side, an insur- 
gent in education, altogether against 
most of my profession, altogether in 
sympathy with the over-fed student, 
and altogether against the prevailing 
system of overfeeding, which stuffs, 
crams, pours in, spoon-feeds, and as a 
sort of deathbed repentance institutes 
creative work after graduation. 

How do you yourself stand oh this 
question? Is your idea of a good 
student that of a good * receptacle ' ? 
Do you regard your instructors as 
useful grain hoppers whose duty it is 
to gather kernels of wisdom from all 
sources and direct them into your re- 
25 



HUXLEY 

ceptive minds ? Are you content to 
be a sort of psychic Sacculina, a vege- 
tative animal, your mind a vast sack 
with tw^o systems, one for the incur- 
rent, the other for the outcurrent of 
predigested ideas ? If so, all your 
mental organs of combat and locomo- 
tion will atrophy. Do you put your 
faith in reading, or in book know- 
ledge ? If so, you should know that 
not a five foot shelf of books, not even 
the ardent reading of a fifty foot 
shelf aided by prodigious memory will 
give you that enviable thing called 
culture, because the yardstick of this 
precious quality is not what you take 
in but what you give out, and this 
from the subtle chemistry of your 
brain must have passed through a 
mental metabolism of your own so 
that you have lent something to it. 
To be a man of culture you need not 
26 



AND EDUCATION 

be a man of creative power, because 
such men are few, they are born not 
made; but you must be a man of some 
degree of centrifugal force, of indi- 
viduality, of critical opinion, who 
must make over what is read into 
conversation and into life. Yes, one 
little idea of your own well expressed 
has a greater cultural value than one 
hundred ideas you absorb; one page 
that you produce, finely written, new 
to science or to letters and really 
worth reading, outweighs for your 
own purposes the five foot shelf. On 
graduation, presto^ all changes, then 
of necessity must your life be inde- 
pendent and centrifugal ; and just in 
so far as it has these powers will it be 
successful ; just in so far as it is merely 
imitative will it be a failure. 

There is no revolution in the con- 
trary, or outflowing design. Like all 
27 



HUXLEY 

else in the world of thought it is, in 
the germ at least, as old as the Greeks 
and its illustrious pioneer was Socrates 
(469—399 B. c), who led the ap- 
proach to truth not by laying down 
the law himself but by means of an- 
swers required of his students. The 
efferent outflowing principle, more- 
over, is in the program of the British 
mathematician. Perry and many other 
reformers to-day. 

Against the centripetal theory of 
acquiring culture Huxley revolted 
with all his might. His daily train- 
ing in the centrifugal school was in 
the genesis of opinion ; and he in- 
cessantly practiced the precept that 
forming one's own opinion is infinitely 
better than borrowing one. Our 
sophisticated age discourages origin- 
ality of view because of the plenitude 
of a ready-made supply of editorials, 
28 



AND EDUCATION 

of reviews, of reviews of reviews, of 
critiques, comments, translations and 
cribs. Study political speeches, not 
editorials about them ; read original 
debates, speeches, and reports. If 
you purpose to be a naturalist get as 
soon as you can at the objects them- 
selves ; if you would be an artist, go 
to your models ; if a writer, on the 
same principle take your authors at 
first hand, and, after you have wrestled 
with the texts, and reached the full 
length of your own fathom line, then 
take the fathom line of the critic and 
reviewer. Do not trust to mental 
peptones. Carry the independent, in- 
quisitive, skeptical and even rebellious 
spirit of the graduate school well 
down into undergraduate life, and 
even into school life. If you are a 
student force yourself to think inde- 
pendently ; if a teacher compel your 
29 



HUXLEY 

youth to express their own minds. 
In Ustening to a lecture weigh the 
evidence as presented, cultivate a 
polite skepticism, not affected but 
genuine, keep a running fire of inter- 
rogation marks in your mind, and 
you will finally develop a mind of 
your own. Do not climb that 
mountain of learning in the hope 
that when you reach the summit you 
will be able to think for yourself; 
think for yourself while you are 
climbing. 

In studying the lives of your great 
men you will find certain of them 
were veritable storehouses of facts, 
but Darwin, the greatest of them all 
in the last century, depended largely 
upon his inveterate and voluminous 
powers of note-taking. Thus you 
may pray for the daily bread of real 
mental growth, for the future paradise 
30 



AND EDUCATION 

is a state of mind and not a state of 
memory. The line of thought is the 
Hne of greatest resistance ; the line of 
memory is the line of least resistance ; 
in itself it is purely imitative, like the 
gold or silver electroplating process 
which lends a superficial coating of 
brilliancy or polish to what may be a 
shallow mind. 

The case is deliberately overstated 
to give it emphasis. 

True, the accumulated knowledge 
of what has been thought and said, 
serves as the gravity law which will 
keep you from flying off at a tangent. 
But no warning signals are needed, 
there is not the least danger that con- 
structive thinking will drive you away 
from learning; it will much more 
surely drive you to it, with a deeply 
intensified reverence for your intellec- 
tual forebears ; in fact, the eldest ofF- 
31 



HUXLEY 

spring of centrifugal education is that 
keen and fresh appetite for knowledge 
which springs only from trying to add 
your own mite to it. How your 
Maxwell, Herz, Rontgen, Curie, with 
their world-invigorating discoveries 
among the laws of radiant matter, be- 
gin to soar in your estimation when 
you yourself wrest one single new 
fact from the reluctant world of 
atoms ! How your modern poets, 
Maeterlinck and Rostand, take on the 
air of inspiration when you would 
add a line of prose verse to what they 
are delving for in this mysterious 
human faculty of ours. Regard Vol- 
taire at the age of ten in * Louis-le- 
Grand,' the Eton of France, already 
producing bad verses, but with a pas- 
sionate voracity for poetry and the 
drama. Regard the youthful Huxley 
returning from his voyage of the 
32 



AND EDUCATION 

* Rattlesnake ' and laying out for 
himself a ten years' course in search 
of pure information. 

This route of your own to opinions, 
ideas, and the discovery of new facts 
or principles brings you back again to 
Huxley as the man who always had 
something of his own to say and 
labored to say it in such a way as to 
force people to listen to him. His 
wondrous style did not come easily 
to him; he himself told me it cost 
him years of effort, and I consider his 
advice about style far wiser than that 
of Herbert Spencer. Why forego 
pleasures, turn your back on the 
world, the flesh, and the devil, and 
devote your life to erudition, ob- 
servation, and the pen if you remain 
unimpressive, if you cannot get an 
audience, if no one cares to read what 
you write ? This moral is one of the 

2>Z 



HUXLEY 
first that Huxley has impressed upon 
you, namely, write to be read; if 
necessary ''stoop to conquer," employ 
all your arts and wiles to get an audi- 
ence in science, in literature, in the 
arts, in politics. Get an audience you 
must, otherwise you will be a cipher 
and not a force. 

Pursuant of the constructive design, 
the measure of the teacher's success is 
the degree in which ideas come not 
from him but from his pupils. A 
brilliant address may produce a tem- 
porary emotion of admiration, a dry 
lecture may produce a permanent 
productive impulse in the hearers. 
One may compare some who are pop- 
ularly known as gifted teachers to 
expert swimmers who sit on the bank 
and talk inspiringly on analyses of 
strokes ; the centrifugal teacher takes 
the pupils into the water with him, 
34 



AND EDUCATION 

he may even pretend to drown and 
call for a rescue. In football par- 
lance the coach must get into the 
scrimmage with the team. This was 
the lesson taught me by the great 
embryologist Francis Balfour of Cam- 
bridge, who was singularly noted for 
doing joint papers with his men. An 
experiment I have tried with marked 
success in order to cultivate centrifu- 
gal power and expression at the same 
time is to get out of the lecture chair 
and make my students in turn lecture 
to me. This is virtually the famous 
method of teaching law re-discovered 
by the educational genius of Langdell; 
the students do all the lecturing and 
discoursing, the professor lolls quietly 
in his chair and makes his comments ; 
the stimulus upon ambition and com- 
petition is fairly magical ; there is in 
the classroom the real intellectual 
35 



HUXLEY 

struggle for existence which one 
meets in the world of affairs. I would 
apply this very Socratic principle in 
every branch of instruction, early and 
late, and thus obey the * acceleration ' 
law in education which I have spoken 
of above as bringing into earlier and 
earlier stages those powers which are 
to be actually of service in after life. 
There is then no mystery about 
education if we plan it along the ac- 
tual lines of self-development fol- 
lowed by these great leaders and shape 
its deep under-current principles after 
our own needs and experience. Look 
early at the desired goal and work 
toward it from the very beginning. 
The proof that the secret does not lie 
in subject, or language, but in prepa- 
ration for the living productive prin- 
ciple is found in the fact that there 
have been relatively educated men in 
36 



AND EDUCATION 

every stage of history. The wall 
painters in the Magdalenian caves were 
the producers and hence the educated 
men of their day. This goal of pro- 
duction was sought even earlier by the 
leaders of Eolithic men 200,000 years 
ago and is equally magnetic for the 
men of dirigible balloons and aero- 
planes of our day. It is, to follow in 
mind-culture the principle of addition 
and accretion characteristic of all liv- 
ing things, namely, to develop the 
highest degree of productive power, 
centrifugal force, original, creative, 
individual efficiency. Through this 
the world advances ; the Neolithic 
man with his invention of polished 
implements succeeds the Palasolithic, 
and the man of books and printing 
replaces the savage. 

The standards of a liberal mind are 
and always have been the same, 
37 ■ 



HUXLEY 

namely, the sense of Truth and Beauty, 
both of which are again in con- 
formity with Nature. 

" Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all 
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 
Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. 

The sources of our facts are and 
always have been the same, namely, 
the learning of what men before you 
have observed and recorded, and the 
advance only through the observation 
of new truth, that is, old to nature 
but new to man. The handling of 
this knowledge has always been the 
same, namely, through human reason. 
The giving forth of this knowledge 
and thus the furthering of ideas and 
customs has and always will be the 
same, namely, through expression, 
vocal, written, or manual, that is, in 
symbols and in design. 

It follows that the all round liber- 
38 



AND EDUCATION 
ally educated man, from Palaeolithic 
times to the time when the earth 
shall become a cold cinder, will al- 
ways be the same, namely, the man 
who follows his standards of truth and 
beauty, who employs his learning and 
observation, his reason, his expression, 
for purposes of production, that is, to 
add something of his own to the stock 
of the world' s ideas. This is the 
author's conception of a liberal edu- 
cation. 

One cannot too often quote the 
rugged insistence of Carlyle : ** Pro- 
duce ! Produce ! Were it but the 
pitifuUest infinitesimal fraction of a 
product, produce it in God's name ! 
'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: 
out with it, then." 

Now note that whereas there are 
the above six powers, namely, truth 
and beauty, learning and observation, 
39 



HUXLEY 

reason, and expression, which subserve 
the seventh, production or constructive 
thinking, and whereas the giving out 
of ideas is the object to be attained, 
only one power figures prominently 
in our modern system of college and 
school education, namely, the learning 
of facts and the memory thereof. It 
is no exaggeration to say that this 
makes up 95% of modern education. 
Who are the meteors of school and 
college days ? For the most part those 
with precocious or well trained mem- 
ories. Why do so many of these 
meteors flash out of existence at grad- 
uation ? The answer is simple if you 
accept my conception of education. 
Whereas it takes six powers to make 
a liberally educated man or woman, 
and seven to make a productive man 
or woman, only one power has been 
cultivated assiduously in the * centrip- 
40 



AND EDUCATION 
etal ' education ; whereas there are 
two great gateways of knowledge, 
learning and observation, only one has 
been continuously passed through; 
whereas there are two universal stand- 
ards of truth and beauty, only truth has 
constantly been held up to you, and 
that in precept rather than in practice. 
For nothing is surer than this, that 
the sense of truth must come as a 
daily personal experience in the life 
of the student through testing values 
for himself, as it does in the life of 
the scientist, the artist, the physi- 
cian, the engineer, the merchant. 
Note that whereas you are powerless 
unless you can by the metabolism of 
logic make the sum of acquired and 
observed knowledge your own, that 
kind of work-a-day efficient logic has 
never been forced upon you and you 
are daily, perhaps hourly, guilty of 
41 



HUXLEY 

the non seqiiitur, the post hoc ergo 
propter hoc, the 'undistributed middle,' 
and all those innocent sins against 
truth which come through the il- 
logical mind. 

'* That man/' says Huxley, ** has 
had a liberal education . . . whose 
intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, 
with all its parts of equal strength, 
and in smooth working order ; ready, 
like a steam-engine, to be turned to 
any kind of work, and spin the gos- 
samers as well as forge the anchors of 
the mind." 

Note that whereas you are a useless 
member of society unless you can give 
forth something of what you know 
and feel in writing, speaking, or de- 
sign, your expressive powers may have 
been atrophied through insufficient 
use. In brief, you may have shunned 
individual opinion, observation, logic, 
expression, because they are each and 
42 



AND EDUCATION 

every one on the lines of greatest re- 
sistance. And your teachers not only 
allowed you but actually encouraged 
and rewarded you for following the 
lines of least resistance in the accu- 
rate reproduction, in examination 
papers and marking systems, of 
their own ideas and those you found 
in books. 

May you, therefore, write down 
these seven words and read them over 
every morning : Truth, Beauty, Learn- . 
ing. Observation, Reason, Expres- 
sion, Production. 

In the wondrous old quilt work of 
inherited, or ancestral predispositions 
which make your being you may be 
gifted with all these seven powers in 
equal and well balanced degree; if 
you are so blessed you have a great 
career before you. If, as is more 
likely, you have in full measure only 
a part of each, or some in large meas- 
43 



HUXLEY 

ure, some in small, keep on the daily- 
examination of your chart as giving 
you the canons of a liberal education 
and of a productive mind. 

Remember that as regards the some- 
what overworked word * service' every 
addition in every conceivable depart- 
ment of human activity which is con- 
structive of society is service ; that the 
spirit of science is to transfer some- 
thing of value from the unknown into 
the realm of the known, and is, there- 
fore, identical with the spirit of litera- 
ture; that the moral test of every 
advance is whether or not it is con- 
structive, for whatever is constructive 
is moral. 

I would not for a moment take 
advantage of the present opportunity 
to discourage the study of human na- 
ture and of the humanities, but for 
what is called the best opening for a 
constructive career let it be Nature. 
44 



AND EDUCATION 

The ground for my preference is 
that human nature is an exhaustible 
fountain of research ; Homer under- 
stood it well; Solomon fathomed it; 
Shakespeare divined it, both normal 
and abnormal; the modernists have 
been squeezing out the last drops of 
abnormality. 

Nature, studied since Aristotle's 
time, is still full to the brim; no 
perceptible falling of its tides is 
evident from any point at which it is 
attacked, from nebulae to protoplasm; 
it is always wholesome, refreshing, and 
invigorating. Of the two creative 
literary artists of our time, Maeter- 
linck, jaded with human abnormality, 
comes back to the bee and the flowers 
and the 'blue bird,' with a delicious 
renewal of youth, while Rostand turns 
to the barnyard. 



45 



EC 29 1910 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



